Bloody Williamson (26 page)

As soon as Duty finished Tim Cagle rose and addressed the court. In a voice trembling with emotion he said that he approved
what the State’s Attorney had done. Then he pleaded for peace among the warring factions. He recalled the days of the Bloody Vendetta, in which he confessed that he had been involved. The participants in that long-drawn-out feud had been good men; so were many of the principals in the Klan war. But the fighting must stop. “Let’s get it settled,” the old man begged. “We have a great country here and my God, let’s be great in it!”

Judge Bowen granted the State’s Attorney’s motion, and the Sheltons walked from the courtroom free men.

Half an hour later Galligan, special deputies “Bud” Allison and Ora Thomas, the Shelton brothers, and other enemies of the Klan drove to John Smith’s garage in Herrin, stepped out of their automobiles, and entered the establishment. All were armed. They intended to recover the Dodge car that Jack Skelcher had been driving on the day of his death, and that Smith had been holding ever since. Now that the murder charge against the Sheltons had been dismissed, the car would not be needed as evidence. The show of force was called for—so Galligan thought—because the garage was a Klan gathering-place.

Galligan asked for Smith. When told by one of the several men who were loafing around the place that the garage owner had gone home to dinner, Galligan said that he had come to get the Dodge, and demanded that it be produced. An attendant started to comply with his demand, but with infuriating slowness. Galligan ordered him, profanely, to get a move on. The attendant replied, also profanely. Someone in the sheriff’s party undertook to quicken the garageman’s dragging steps by punching him in the ribs with the barrel of a pistol. A scuffle followed.

The noise attracted a passerby named Chester Reid. Stepping inside the garage door, and seeing that a fight was about to break out, Reid called to the men to put up their pistols. Two or three of the sheriff’s men, coming up to talk to the newcomer, noticed a car passing slowly and ran out to stop it. Recognizing the riders as Klansmen, they jerked them out and ordered them to line up on the street.

Someone fired. An instant later volleys rang out inside the garage and on the street in front of it. When the shooting stopped six men were dead or dying, and several others were bleeding from wounds.
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Three of the dead men were Klansmen—Green Dunning, Dewey Newbold, and Charles Wollard. Reid, the peacemaker, lost his life; so did Otto Rowland, another innocent bystander. Allison, the sheriff’s special deputy, was the sixth casualty. Herman Phemister, one of the sheriff’s friends, was badly wounded; Carl Shelton was shot in the hand.

Galligan and the surviving members of his party placed the dying and wounded men in cars and took them to the Herrin hospital. That done, the sheriff telephoned to the Adjutant General and asked that troops be rushed to the city. Fearing an attack on the hospital, he ordered special deputies from all over the county to report there as soon as possible. At the same time, the Klan was mobilizing at the Methodist Church two blocks away. Fortunately, forty men of the headquarters company of the 130th Infantry arrived in trucks from Carbondale before the two groups clashed. As soon as their machine guns were set up on the hospital grounds the danger of open civil war ended. That evening a full company from Salem reinforced the first militiamen. On the surface Herrin was quiet, but the bulges of concealed weapons showed in the light summer clothing of many men.

The presence of troops gave assurance that for the moment at least there would be no gunplay, but not even soldiers can keep people from talking. So the battle of the Klan continued with words. From Atlanta, Young wired to John Smith: “If the boys need me I will come, if I have to come on one leg.” “We’ve fooled with these Klansmen long enough,” Galligan told a
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
reporter, “and you can say for me we’re
ready to fight it out.” The Rev. I. E. Lee, Herrin Baptist minister, told the same reporter that the election of a new State’s Attorney and a new sheriff offered the only solution of the county’s trouble. Calling on Duty for a comment on Lee’s statement, the reporter noticed that the State’s Attorney shook hands with his left hand while he tried, unsuccessfully, to conceal his automatic behind his back. All the county needed, Duty said, was a thorough cleaning-up by the National Guard. If the commanding officer would seize the four arsenals of the Klan in Herrin, the principal source of trouble would be eliminated. Not to be left out, the Ministers’ Association of Williamson County issued a long statement, reviewing the history of local law-enforcement, or the lack of it, and concluding with a prescription similar to that of the Reverend Mr. Lee:

Duty, shown this pronouncement, made the kind of comment that always infuriated the crusading preachers: “Every time they get up in their pulpits they ring in the Klan. They stir up trouble and hatred, and the people who listen to them come out inflamed.”

In a courthouse guarded by militiamen armed with automatic rifles and hand grenades, a coroner’s jury held its inquest on the deaths of those killed in the Smith garage riot. Witnesses contradicted each other. Charles Denham, Herrin merchant, swore that while the riot was in progress Duty, Judge Bowen, and Jane Lassiter, the coroner’s secretary, drove past the Smith
garage and that Duty and Bowen fired into his car. Miss Lassiter swore that at that time she and Duty, in the latter’s car, were well on their way to Marion. Mrs. Chester Reid identified John Smith, the garage owner, as the man who shot her husband; others swore that Smith did not arrive at the garage until fifteen or twenty minutes after the shooting. Dr. Black, some witnesses testified, fired at the rioters; others asserted that he drove up hastily and immediately began to work with the men who had been shot.

The jurors, impressed by Mrs. Reid’s testimony in spite of contrary evidence, found that Smith killed Reid. They also concluded that Allison and Dunning killed each other. The other three men met death at the hands of parties unknown. Smith was ordered held for the grand jury.

The implication of Smith in the murder of Reid made Klansmen boil with anger. So did the appearance of Ora Thomas at the Herrin hospital four days after the riot, even though he came only to pay a visit to the wounded Phemister. As word of his presence spread, groups of Klansmen formed, and the outlook became ominous. Captain H. L. Bigelow, commanding the sixteen militiamen who remained in Herrin—all others had been sent home two days earlier—learned what impended and ordered Thomas to leave the city. Thus a clash was averted. But passions had no chance to cool. On September 4 word came from Danville that a federal grand jury had just indicted Young and nine other Herrin residents on charges of impersonating federal officers. On the same day, in Herrin, Galligan, Ora Thomas, Carl, Earl, and Bernie Shelton, and other members of the sheriff’s faction were put under bond to await the action of the next grand jury in connection with the Smith garage riot; so were nine prominent Klansmen. Herrin seethed with apprehension.

Young did not help matters by returning from Atlanta. On September 12 he and his wife registered at the Ly-Mar Hotel in
Herrin; immediately afterward, accompanied by a large party of Klansmen, he drove to Benton to give bond under the federal indictments.

The next day he was formally expelled from the Klan. (In the action taken against him in the summer he had only been relieved of his position as a Klan employee.) Charles G. Palmer, Illinois Grand Dragon, gave notice of Young’s expulsion in the
Illinois Kourier
, the official Klan paper. Young, Palmer asserted, had an “inordinate craving for personal publicity,” a fondness for “ostentatious displays of firearms and braggadocio,” and a tendency to take the law “into his own hands, shoot at the drop of a hat, and give utterance to the most incendiary thoughts.” He had performed “splendid service” in Williamson County, but even there he had been well paid for his work.

Young’s expulsion from the order had little effect on his popularity with the rank and file of Williamson County Klansmen. That became evident a few weeks later when he appeared, unannounced, at a Klan meeting in Marion. Wild cheers broke out as he hobbled to the platform on two canes, and applause rocketed through the auditorium again when he declared that for the first time in his life he was going to vote Republican. “If you want to have the illegal sale of liquor, disreputable women, and disorder in the county,” he told the audience, “vote the Democratic ticket on election day. If you want law enforcement, vote the Republican ticket.” Hundreds rushed up to shake his hand when he finished.

Three days before Young’s dramatic appearance Galligan announced that he had dismissed the deputies whom he had appointed by agreement with the Citizens’ Committee. One of his new appointees, he revealed, was Ora Thomas, who would take the place of Allison, killed in the Smith garage riot.

If Galligan had lain awake nights to devise means of driving the Klansmen to fury—and perhaps he had—he could have thought of no better way than to give Thomas a permanent appointment. The hatred they bore the new deputy made their
animosity toward the sheriff a pale emotion. A resident of the county since boyhood, Thomas had worked in the mines until the United States entered the first World War. He saw service in France, and was wounded in action. After the war he went back to coal mining, but soon drifted into shady occupations. The fact that he was with “Whitey” Doering, a convicted mail-robber and member of Egan’s Rats, a notorious St. Louis gang, when Doering was killed in November 1923, gave rise to the report that he too belonged to that unsavory mob. Klansmen believed him to be the organizer of the Knights of the Flaming Circle, and he was certainly a leader of the violent anti-Klan faction. Caught in two of Young’s big raids, he had only recently been dismissed from jail after serving one of Judge Lindley’s stiffer sentences. As late as October 4—ten days before his appointment—he had been indicted for murder in connection with the Smith garage riot. In fact, thirteen indictments stood against him at the time Galligan made him a permanent deputy.

Thomas’s record, not a good one for a law-enforcement officer, contrasted strangely with his appearance. Slender and under average height, he carried himself with none of Young’s swagger. To his friends he showed a quiet joviality; to his enemies he was taciturn, hard, and unrelenting. His sparkling black eyes shone from a sensitive face, the natural pallor of which was accentuated by a heavy shock of curly hair. And his long dextrous fingers seemed out of place on the trigger of a blunt automatic.

Whatever Thomas’s enemies said of him, none ever questioned his courage.

Within a few days Galligan sent his new deputy on an errand that baited the Klan to the limit of endurance. In Herrin, Young, though still on crutches, became involved in a fight between members of the two factions. After the fracas one of the principals swore out a warrant charging him and two other Klansmen with assault to commit murder. Galligan applied to Captain
Bigelow for two squads of guardsmen, and then gave the warrants to Thomas to serve. When Young and the two other men who had been placed under arrest were taken to the courthouse to post their bonds, the soldiers had to clear a pathway with bayonets. Only the rifles of the militiamen prevented an outbreak.

And only the rifles of militiamen, stationed at all the polling-places in Herrin, kept peace on election day in early November. At that time the Klan swept the field, putting Arlie O. Boswell into the State’s Attorney’s office and electing all other candidates it supported. But the result of the election raised the temper of the public to such a pitch that Galligan asked the governor to supplement the militia on the ground, now numbering seventy, with another company, and the commanding officer joined him in requesting that there be no parade or demonstration by the victorious faction.

Young, however, could not be repressed. Late in the afternoon of the day following the election he drove up to the courthouse and parked his car opposite the main entrance. A number of his constant followers accompanied him. Seeing Adron Smith, one of Galligan’s new deputies, on the steps, he called out tauntingly:

“Well, Adron, I understand they’ve let you out.”

(The reference was to the refusal of the county board, a day or two earlier, to pay the salaries of the sheriff’s new appointees.)

“Who wants to know?” Smith replied.

An argument followed, and one of Young’s men kicked Smith down the steps. Word of the fight spread instantly, and men ran from all directions for the showdown they expected. Fortunately, several deputies, hastily summoned from the jail, arrived in time to prevent an outbreak, and when Sam Stearns induced Young to leave, serious trouble was once more averted.

By this time Young’s behavior had become so reckless that the Klan leaders concluded his mere presence could no longer
be tolerated. The man was constantly browbeating everyone who opposed him in the slightest degree, and resorting to violence far too often. The performance he put on at the office of the
Herrin News
, about this time, was typical. Stomping into the front office with three armed guards, he cursed out the people there, and then went back to the composing-room. There he served notice on a little Irish linotype-operator that the next time he saw his name in print he would come in and clean up the entire force. The operator, a new employee unawed by Young’s reputation, made a reply that angered the insolent visitor. Young swore, and broke one of his walking-sticks over the man’s head. The Irishman landed a punch in Young’s face, ran, and was never seen again.